Wednesday, September 5, 2012

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And so the summer got away from me . . . in July we burrowed back into our homelives after the 3 weeks in Colombia -- Monica working the Nature Center camps -- catching frogs and snakes and vying with the kids in games like predator or sharks and minnows -- bruised and scuffed and turning browner despite her best efforts with the sun screen. Me at the computer doing my bit to reform the US public policy discourse -- on social security, jobs quality, unionization. Dabbling in the garden as growth stalled in the rainless heat. Adding a honey super to the hives and letting the bees do their thing with whatever flowers they could find. At the end of July was the family reunion in Pennsylvania, where 200 members of the scattered clans gather at the farms in the home valley and eat and gossip and dance at my cousin's barn. And there we handed the boys off to the grandparents for a few weeks. I tore out the rotten bathroom wall and slowly learned the art of tiling. Prepared for the return of our boys and got the guest room ready for a third, temporary son joining us from Mexico for the year. Monica painted over the wallpaper -- fuschia flowers never to be seen again.And I didn't blog as weeks and weeks piled up and fell back down, and the world didn't seem to move any closer to solving problems: careening climate, the exhaustion of representative democracy and senescence of civil society, encroaching energy decline and economic contraction, the increasing brittleness of the food system . . .But it is time for school to start, and José is here. Homework and shooting hoops and lunches to be packed. Kimchi is nearly ready, beets are pickling (except those that Monica turned into borscht), and while some tomatoes are finishing a few are just getting started. And there is much data to be crunched at work, which is at least a solvable challenge. Nine tenths of the potatoes haven't been dug and firewood needs to be cut and stacked.So it is time to re-boot this blog. As long as I can remember, I have kept journals as a way of leaving a trail of bread crumbs behind me in the continuum of time. Without fixed points of text and language, life takes on too much of a hue of unreality, as though we could edit the past as haphazardly as we re-write the present and the future. And in a society that seems to have unreality braided into every fiber, I don't think I can afford to lose what tenuous track I have.